The hottest - Ricardo

SRT stands for Street and Racing
Technology. The name says it all.
Taking the performance,
passion, innovation and teamwork
associated with racing and bringing it
to the street. These ingredients are
critical to the recipe of every exotic
car, every sports car and every highperformance
derivative vehicle on the
market.
Yet the people at DaimlerChrysler’s
SRT division have an extra vital
ingredient that makes for their own
unique flavour – the HEMI ® engine.
The story of how a team of engineers
from Chrysler and Ricardo brought
this already mighty engine up to the
demanding specifications required by
SRT is a story that all enthusiasts
would relate to – and it’s a tale of tight
deadlines, tighter budgets and a team
of individuals all focused on success.
SRT sets the pace
It is the collective responsibility of
Chrysler’s SRT team members to
make those three letters truly mean
something to consumers. By
integrating racing technology,
performance and feel into Chrysler’s
volume products, the SRT engineers
are charged with delivering showcase
vehicles that offer outstanding
performance at unequalled value. SRT
engineers must hit the sweet spot
between mass-market, high volume
products and the lofty realms of exotic
cars. The fruits of their labour are
embodied in vehicles that cast halos
on Chrysler Group’s brands and, more
importantly, drive consumers into
showrooms to boost sales of the
company’s volume-market products.
And, of course, they must build truly
exciting products that put broad grins
on the faces of even the most
demanding automotive enthusiasts.
In 2002, at DaimlerChrysler’s North
American HQ in Auburn Hills, MI,
Chrysler’s then chief operating officer
Dr Wolfgang Bernhard drew on his
personal work experience with another
high performance brand, Mercedes
Benz’s AMG, to lay down a challenge
to the SRT team: Develop a higher
performance version of Chrysler’s
vaunted 5.7 litre HEMI ® engine. More
horsepower, more displacement, more
fun, he decreed. That might sound easy
at first blush, but there were a few
catches. The project needed to be
completed in about two years, roughly
half the usual time, and with an
extremely tight investment budget of
only $25 million.
The SRT team knew that in order to
achieve these goals it would be critical
to find ways to radically cut the
development time and costs
associated with more traditional
projects. They would need to select
strategic suppliers that could become
part of the team and share the passion
and urgency that the project
demanded. Since the new 6.1 litre
HEMI ® was to be based on the 5.7
litre, that was the obvious place to
start – and since Ricardo engineers
had been heavily involved in the
original 5.7 litre HEMI ® development,
a small team was asked to make an
initial assessment as to what would be
needed.
Pete Brown, vice president of
propulsion and project executive on
the programme for Ricardo, recalls the
formative deliberations: “Dr. Bernhard
wanted to use the 6.1 HEMI ® project,
led by the Dan Knott's SRT group with
support from an experienced, strategic
engineering partner, as a way of
evaluating new ways of doing engine
projects quickly. It needed to go
through the group’s Performance
Vehicle Operations (the original name
Q3, 2006 • RICARDO QUARTERLY REVIEW 09